Pastebot Filters

February 4, 2017

On a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber mentioned Pastebot, a clipboard manager from the good folks at Tapbots. I decided to give the app a try and have been impressed by both its ease of use and expandability. Not only does Pastebot maintain a history of your Mac’s clipboard, it also has a handy ‘Filters’ feature, allowing you modify text on the fly.

For a simple example, I have created a filter, that will convert a plaintext URL, https://austintooley.com into Markdown. All I need to do is copy a URL, and then invoke Pastebot (Shift + Cmd + V), select the filter icon next to the clipboard item, apply the correct filter, and voilà, [Link Text](https://austintooley.com).

If you’re feeling really dangerous, Pastebot also allows Shell scripts to be run as a part of filters, allowing for powerful operations to be performed on paste. A great example of this is a default filter which uses a script to convert Markdown to HTML.

If you’re interested, I have made available a few simple Pastebot filters for creating Markdown content: lists, blockquotes, URL’s and images. You can find them here.